Renzo Piano, the Italian architect who designed the Nasher Sculpture Center, said Thursday that he’s grieving over the storm of solar rays invading his prized creation from Museum Tower, its 42-story next-door neighbor, whose highly reflective glass has been a problem for months. Piano visited the Nasher on Wednesday, seeing the damage for the third time since it was discovered last fall.

Piano is not part of the media blackout imposed by Dallas attorney Tom Luce, who’s acting as a facilitator, trying to broker a solution between the Nasher and Museum Tower. Piano spoke to us on Thursday morning in Fort Worth, where he’s working on the expansion of the Kimbell Art Museum.

“We are not aggressive people,” he said of himself and those at the Nasher. “We tried to address the problem quietly.” But the problem now, he says, “is very serious,” because in his words no one on the other side is taking the problem seriously enough, much less rushing to find a solution. He said the situation should not be allowed to linger another six months, let alone two more years. But his sense is that the Luce-moderated discussions – there has been only one meeting – underscore a process that appears to be moving at a glacial pace.

“You have an aggressor and you have a victim,” Piano says. “This is not new. The history of time is full of people who must be careful not to project onto others their problems.” He described the effects of the sun’s rays as “radiation,” saying the solar ray gun of Museum Tower has “totally” compromised the intent of the delicate, honeycombed roof he patented and installed atop the Nasher. He equated the "radiation" emanating from the tower to a deluge of rain, saying, “Can you believe someone saying, ‘I don’t want my rain, so I put my rain on my neighbor, on the guy next door. I flood the guy next door, because I don’t want my rain. I don’t want my radiation so I give my radiation to the guy next door.' This is absolutely unfair. It’s not something mysterious. It’s something everyone knows.”

Piano says that because the Nasher is a privately held collection, it is free to leave its Flora Street museum and go elsewhere -- although he noted that this is not something the Nasher family wants to do, that it was the dream of founder Raymond Nasher to put his collection in the Dallas Arts District at that location. Were Nasher alive today, Piano says, he would be “mad, mad, mad, mad, mad" at what's happened to his beloved jewel. "It's not a jewel because of the architecture. It's a jewel because of what Ray left behind."

His overriding emotion, Piano said, is sadness. "I am very, very, very, very sad. Fifty percent for me and 50 percent for Ray Nasher. He was so proud of his museum, which was all about affection and passion. Ray was not born in Dallas, but he fell in love with Dallas. So how can you kill something like that? That's why I'm terribly sad about all of this."

He believes, however, that it’s fixable, that a win-win architectural enhancement could be applied to Museum Tower that would solve the problem and be better for the offender.

You can read more of our interview with Piano in Friday’s print edition of The Dallas Morning News.